Salut Maman

Portraits taken during interviews in Casablanca (2019) while reporting on routes and bases used by African teenagers crossing Morocco to reach its northern borders before sailing off to Gibraltar.

In April 2019, Moroccan border police forcibly expelled almost 200 West and Central African refugees from their northern border of Tangier and the Spanish enclave city of Ceuta. The authorities abandoned these groups in the port of Casablanca, stripped them of their belongings, and stranded them more than 300 km away from the Strait of Gibraltar.

These pictures result from a collaborative experience in which they expressed the state of their journey as embedded messages to their families due to their lack of connectivity, hoping to reach home someday. Mostly, all of them shared a common recipient: their mothers. Some addresses remained untraceable, and the rest were sent without proof of delivery.

Casablanca, 2019.

This project was made in collaboration with The Minority Globe and self-published in 2024 as a postcard box set to support this organization.